Jean-Pierre Dantan - Reputation and Influence

Reputation and Influence

Arguably this last consideration, the concern that Dantan was too commercial and too populistic, is among the most fascinating questions about the artist. Most critics agree that he was not a great artist, but his work is an important link in the history of caricature, and even if they are artistic failings, both commercialization and populism are important aspects of the Paris which Dantan's younger contemporary, Charles Baudelaire would describe as essentially modern.

Commending Dantan's caricatures in L'Artiste in 1839, Gustave Planche mocked Dantan's subjects, whose appetite for notoriety made them commission their own disfigurement in caricature, and then he pointed out how Dantan's works, apparently not very like their subjects, first provoke the reaction, "How horrible!" but then the realization "But it so looks like him!". If the question is Dantan's own status, it would be too much to read into this a pre-figurement of Picasso's remark about his own portrait of Gertrude Stein, "Everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will." The matter might be different if the question is the position of caricature.

Caricature is a comparatively new form. The Oxford Dictionary of Art notes that "political caricature as we know it today emerged in the last three decades of the 18th century" in Britain, where artists such as Gillray learned how to distill the likenesses of kings and politicians into recognizabale stereotypes. But the greatest master of the genre was Honoré Daumier in nineteenth century France. This is close to what the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica has to say, but Britannica also notes the importance of Dantan's "admirable portrait-busts" alongside the realistic sketches of Henri Monnier and the low life drolleries of Nicolas Toussaint Charlet in the development of the French caricature towards Daumier. Dantan's natural talent as a portraitist, his skill at capturing a rapid likeness, his interest in phrenology, and his association via the salons of Cicéri and the Princesse de Belgiojoso with an intellectual elite interested in a new form of realism, a romantic or expressive realism that captured the psychological realities of human life, would have pushed him to a form of caricature that was neither about superficial resemblance, nor about manufacturing stereotypes. Such an "evidently talented portraitist, whose talents nevertheless did not reach the level of David d'Angers, nor the intensity of Honoré Daumier," might nonetheless be representative of a new style of caricature, and even of art, that moved away from just presenting its subject to actively representing, revealing, and perhaps to an extent creating it.

If we avoid speculating on the nature of caricature and simply point to examples, then it is clear that Dantan was a prominent exemplar of the caricaturist in Paris, and that his busts and statuettes are good examples of caricature. He may have refrained from much political caricature, but his busts and statuettes were exaggeratedly expressive if not always quite satirical (a statuette of Liszt has the "spiderlike composer take possession of his piano with an inspired air and spindly limbs"). He was undoubtedly a direct influence on Daumier, and he was a close associate of other caricaturists. Grandville illustrated his catalogue, and he was good friends with the gifted, younger graphic caricaturist, Cham. Dantan had made a caricature bust of Cham, and in his CHAM, sa vie et son oeuvre Félix Ribeyre reproduces a drawing by Dantan of Cham being carried about by his pet dog at the baths in Baden-Baden, which were popular with Parisian society. Ribeyre and Pierre Véron tell stories of Dantan and Cham playing jokes and pranks at Baden-Baden. Dantan's most prominent students were fr:Jean-Baptiste Gustave Deloye and fr:Prosper d'Épinay.

And if nothing else, the five hundred or so sculptures that Dantan made from a detailed documentary of a significant portion of Parisian society in the years 1830-1850.

That Dantan is a relatively important artist in his own right, and certainly significant in the history of caricature, combined with his extremely high productivity, might provoke the question as to why he is not better known today. Part of the answer is that much of his production consisted of the essentially uninteresting "serious" work. But perhaps more important is the fact that on his death, his much younger wife, Elise Polycarpe Moutiez, 28 years his junior, destroyed many of the moulds of for his caricature busts, as well as much other material relating to her husband. This may have been done to increase the commercial value of his surviving works, or to boost his artistic reputation, but it may also have been done out of some concern for respectability, as she is also reputed to have destroyed any trace of a secret museum of erotic work within the Dantanorama. Whatever the reasons, Dantan's reputation declined into near oblivion until Janet Seligman published a monograph on him in 1957. His artistic status has remained somewhat ambiguous, as his work has provoked both positive and negative reactions from critics since his own time to the present. Laurent Baridon, taking into account both the verve of the caricatures and the fatuity of the ever-so-bourgeois "serious" busts, as well as the rather unsophisticated games with rebuses, concludes that Dantan is himself as interesting as a caricature of an artist as he is as an artist.

A recent (late 2009) sale from a catalogue of thirty busts and statuettes by Dantan, was held by Bertrand Talabardon et Bertrand Gautier in Paris. The works were priced from €10,000 to "much more". The sale included thirty caricatures, mostly of musicians, believed to have come from the collection of Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria. For those who cannot afford such prices, works by Dantan can be found in many museums and private collections, especially in France and Britain. The Carnavalet Museum in Paris has the most significant collection.